American History: An Off-Kilter 1992 Student Film from South Park Creator Trey Parker

in Animation, Film, History, Television | March 4th, 2016

Here’s a little exercise:

Spend five minutes recording yourself recapping everything you know about Japanese history.

(International Studies majors and Japanese citizens, please sit this one out.)

Most of us will wind up with a pastiche that’s heavy on pop culture and relatively recent events. The average Japanese schoolchild should have no difficulty identifying the glaring holes and factual errors in our narratives.

If this idea amuses you, you’ll likely enjoy American History, above, South Park creator Trey Parker’s early animated short, a 1993 Student Academy Award silver medalist.

Parker’s Japanese-born University of Colorado classmate, Junichi Nishimura, provided the narration, beginning with Christopher Columbus in 1492 and ending with the “Japan bashing” 41st president, George H.W. Bush. Highlights along the way include the Salem Witch Trials, the Boston Tea Party, the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, Leave It to Beaver, and that time Bush barfed at a state dinner hosted by Japanese Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa.

He also remembers the Alamo, proving one Reddit wag’s hypothesis: If there’s one thing people remember about the Alamo, it is to remember the Alamo…

And then….

Parker and another classmate, Chris Graves, his soon-to-be DP on Cannibal: The Musical, animated the results using the most rudimentary of paper cut outs. It’s easy to spot the fledgling South Park style, as well as Python animator Terry Gilliam’s influence. This may be American history, but the anonymous top hatted hordes bear an awfully close resemblance to South Park’s resident Canadians, Terrance and Phillip.

If the phonetic spellings of non-native speaker Nishimura’s pronunciation makes you uncomfortable, it’s worth noting that he not only worked as an animator on South Park, but also represented his country by playing “President” Hirohito on the extremely funny (and NSFW) “Chinpokomon” episode.

American History will be added to the Animation section of our collection,

via BoingBoing

John Green’s Crash Course in U.S. History: From Colonialism to Obama in 47 Videos

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Read her most recent drama-in-real comic on Narratively. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet: 1846 Book Teaches Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

in History | March 3rd, 2016

Frequently, I see stories in the education news reporting on a textbook company, school board, or curriculum attempting to minimize or erase the history of slavery in the United States. One recent example made national news: a textbook published by McGraw-Hill that described the Atlantic slave trade as bringing “millions of workers from Africa to the United States to work on agricultural plantations.”

Roni Dean-Burren—mother of the student who noticed the “error” and herself an educator—pointed out, writes NPR, that “while the book describes many Europeans immigrating as indentured servants,” there was “no mention in this lesson of Africans forced to the U.S. as slaves.” It’s pretty egregiously bad historical framing; describing slaves as migrant “workers” is at best gross understatement and at worst disinformation.

The textbook company maintains it was a mistake, others have alleged a deliberate whitewash of a history that makes many people uncomfortable. Similarly heated controversies have arisen around certain puzzlingly cheerful children’s books. I won’t weigh in here on the politics of these debates, but I am very curious about why teaching the history of slavery is such a contentious issue in classrooms across the country.

If you were to ask most teachers, they would—one hopes—denounce U.S. slavery as a great moral wrong and praise its end as self-evidently necessary. So what would it look like to teach the subject that way? Well, for one thing, teachers and parents might refer to primary documents like “The Anti-Slavery Alphabet,” an abolitionist teaching tool written by Quakers Hannah and Mary Townsend and sold at the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery society fair in 1846.

The alphabet, writes The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, “consists of sixteen leaves, printed on one side, with the printed pages facing each other and hand-sewn into a paper cover. Each of the letter illustrations is hand-colored.” Certainly a labor of love, and though targeted to young children, it is instructive for students of all ages to see how abolitionist pedagogy framed these issues, refusing to soft-pedal the “wretched” conditions slaves endured.

Nor does this text shy away from directly relating these conditions to the commodity market that sustained them. In the page below, for example, children learn that the sugar “put into your pie and tea / Your candy, and your cake,” comes from slave labor. Ditto the “poisonous and nasty” tobacco the gentlemen chew.

The language, as is typical of the time, is occasionally sentimental or sternly moralistic, but the facts do not suffer much for it. Is this propaganda? Certainly, for a point of view that would take another 20 years, a bloody civil war, and a long struggle through a failed Reconstruction and brutal Jim Crow era to take hold nationwide, pockets of reactionaries notwithstanding.

To see all of “The Anti-Slavery Alphabet,” visit The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit or the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, who allow you to zoom in and examine each page closely. For more contemporary books for children on the history of slavery, see this list of “13 Honest Books About Slavery.” And for a wealth of primary abolitionist documents from the late 18th to the late 19th ( as well as more recent texts on modern slavery) see the archive of “50 Essential Documents” at the Abolition Seminar, an “educational tool for teachers, students, and all who fight for freedom.

via Mashable

Freed Slave Writes Letter to Former Master: You Owe Us $11,680 for 52 Years of Unpaid Labor (1865)

Visualizing Slavery: The Map Abraham Lincoln Spent Hours Studying During the Civil War

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

New Rosa Parks Archive is Now Online: Features 7,500 Manuscripts & 2,500 Photographs, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

in Archives, History, Letters, Life, Photography | February 29th, 2016

It’s telling that the Library of Congress, in digitizing its vast Rosa Parks Collection in close to its entirety, had to resort to a “representative sample” of children’s greeting cards. The lady had no shortage of admirers at the elementary school level.

It’s not surprising that Parks’ refusal to yield her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 resonates with children. The story has the simplicity of a fable, and Parks’ pluck is irresistible. It’s as if she took a slingshot and aimed it right between the eyes of the segregated South.

It’s easy to convey how important her spontaneous act of resistance was to the Civil Rights Movement. However, those few minutes on Bus 2857 cannot be all there is to a woman whose life spanned nine decades (1913–2005). They are just the historical equivalent of a role that an actor cannot escape—great, but ultimately limiting.

The online archive helps to flesh out this iconic figure beyond the confines of a child’s crayoned portrait.

Among the treasures are:

Scanned book covers from her personal library…

A business card from her stint as a staffer for Congressman John Conyers of Michigan… (Parks moved to Detroit shortly after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, after both she and her husband were dismissed from their jobs.)

Handwritten reminiscences about her rural Alabama childhood…

Documentation of speaking engagements and other public appearances…

A handwritten pancake recipe…

Correspondence from a bevy of highly recognizable names

And of course, many, many reflections having to do with the most publicly memorable day in an extremely long life.

Most of the collection can be viewed online and the Library has a teaching aid with suggestions on using these primary sources in the classroom. The video below contains some highlights of the collection, as well as technical information on how its contents have been preserved for future generations.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Writes a List of 16 Suggestions for African-Americans Riding Newly-Integrated Buses (1956)

Read Martin Luther King and The Montgomery Story: The Influential 1957 Civil Rights Comic Book

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hear the Declassified, Eerie “Space Music” Heard During the Apollo 10 Mission (1969)

in History | February 26th, 2016

The above video is a breathless example of American cable television, and how we love a good story and seriously want something to be more fantastic than boring ol’ scientific fact. It also ties into our culture’s perpetual love and nostalgia for the space program of the 1960s.

The anecdote takes place in 1969 during the Apollo 10 mission, when the astronauts on board were in lunar orbit and flying around the dark side of the moon. Having temporarily lost radio contact with earth, they begin to hear “weird music.” Eugene Cernan and John Young can be heard on the recordings asking “You hear that? That whistling sound?” Another astronaut agrees: “That sure is weird music.” The sound lasted for about 60 minutes.

These recordings were only declassified in 2008 by NASA, which only adds to their mystery, along with the fact that the astronauts never spoke on the matter afterwards because they thought nobody would believe them, according to this BBC article.

So what could it have been? A Star Wars cantina on the moon? Martian ham radio operators? The monolith from 2001?

Well, cut through the internet interference and it seems to be radio interference. This thread on Metafilter has some great non-clickbait‑y discussion, including this:

The other likely explanation is that radio noise from the universe resonated with various components in Apollo, and ultimately induced enough current on the radio antenna to generate a signal. On the dark side of the moon, earth-based signals fine tuned for human listeners are absent. Background noise and its impact on Apollo’s communication systems would be prominent on the audio signal.

But maybe this comment offers a better explanation:

Space whales.

Meanwhile, you can cut through all that by listening to the full archive of Apollo 10 recordings that NASA posted on archive.org on 2012. You can find the “music” on track 7, 10–030702_5-OF‑6, starting at 44 minutes in, in all its static‑y glory.

And for those who dig the music of sine waves, you could just listen to this:

Download Free NASA Software and Help Protect the Earth from Asteroids!

Neil deGrasse Tyson: ‘How Much Would You Pay for the Universe?’

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Orson Welles Narrates the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World (1967)

in Film, History | February 24th, 2016

“St. Petersburg, capital of Russia. October the 25th, 1917. The time: twenty-one minutes to ten in the evening. At anchor in the river Neva, the cruiser Aurora waits to take her place in history. In precisely one minute’s time, the crew, led by Bolsheviks, will fire a shot to signal the attack on the winter palace.” So begins Ten Days That Shook the World — not John Reed’s 1919 book of reportage on the October Revolution, nor Sergei Eisenstein’s 1928 film based on it, but a 1967 documentary by Granada Television. And who speaks those words? You won’t have to hear anything more than “St. Petersburg” to recognize the voice of the one and only Orson Welles.

Welles could tell the story of anything, of course, and he does the expected good job recounting that of the fall of Nicolas II, the Kerensky regime, the Bolshevik takeover, and the Russia that rose thereafter, working from a script by the Soviet filmmaker Grigori Alexsandrov, who co-directed Eisenstein’s film. As we listen to Welles speak, we see imagery drawn from a variety of sources: photographs and newspaper clippings, interview footage, contemporary newsreels, and even scenes from historical feature films about the Russian Revolution, especially Eisenstein and Alexandrov’s picture.

I like to think that Welles appreciated this method of documentary construction, which combines an overall adherence to fact with occasional visual departures from it — though the production tightly integrates the “fictional” footage with the “factual” footage, and the former has in many cases shaped our collective mental image of the Russian Revolution more than the latter has. He would step deep into this arena himself less than a decade later with F for Fake, his final, sui generis piece of filmmaking ostensibly about art forgery but really, in both its form and substance, about the line between the true and the false.

Watching Ten Days That Shook the World here almost a half-century into 1967’s future — itself a half-century into 1917’s future — makes it impossible not to think about the continuum of history, and the shifting ways in which we’ve told and retold the stories of those who came before us all along it. “Who dare say where the road they began to travel in 1917 will finally lead them,” asks Orson Welles of the Russians at the documentary’s end, “and us?” The question holds up today just as it did fifty years ago — or indeed a hundred.

War & Peace: An Epic of Soviet Cinema

F for Fake: Orson Welles’ Short Film & Trailer That Was Never Released in America

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

New Digital Archive, “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” Takes You Inside the Dark, Lively World That Shaped the Pioneering Comedian

in Comedy, History | February 18th, 2016

By Scott Saul:

Richard Pryor is a legendary comic, and for good reason. He had extraordinary gifts as a mimic, storyteller, physical comedian, satirist, and improvising actor — gifts he brought together in an act that had the dangerous electricity of an uninsulated wire. Meanwhile he established a feedback loop between his act and his personal life, making use of all those stage chops to draw comedy out of a life that was painfully full of self-sabotage, mayhem, and various forms of abuse.

It was my task, as Pryor’s biographer, to probe the legends of his life, starting with the vivid stories he told of his formative years in the red-light district of Peoria, Illinois. In his stage act and reminiscences, Pryor related how he’d been raised in a brothel by a grandmother and father who worked, respectively, as madam and pimp, and how he had both suffered at their hands and learned from them. He told, too, how he’d made his way in a larger world that, while brutal, was also touched with grace — that grace he felt when he ventured onstage, at school or in a club, and started to find himself as a performer.

Earlier biographers had wondered how much Pryor had embellished his past in building his act around his life story. In my research I discovered a motherlode of material — family photos, court records, newspaper articles, and more — that not only corroborated the outlines of Pryor’s story but also filled in the picture and gave it a historical depth. I could see, for instance, how Pryor’s taboo-busting comedy was rooted in his childhood environment, a black working-class underground where taboos were busted on a regular basis, and hypocrisies called to account. You can watch a short, four-minute film above that sets the story of the young Richard and his family against the backdrop of “Roarin’ Peoria.”

Ultimately, I discovered so much in my research into Pryor’s formative years that I felt it couldn’t be contained in the book I was writing (in which Pryor’s first two decades in Peoria make up only one of five sections). So I built a digital companion where you can explore over 200 documents from “Richard Pryor’s Peoria”. Here you can see, through the young Richard’s report card, how he struggled in the confines of Peoria schools. You can see, through the divorce case of his parents, how his mother (contrary to reports that she abandoned him) tried, unsuccessfully, to steal Richard away from his grandmother and father, and from the red-light district itself. You can see, through the paper trail of Richard’s formidable grandmother Marie, how she fought — with wiliness and blunt force — against her abusive husband and against the system of Jim Crow. And you can visit the various scenes of Richard’s youth, from his family’s tavern and the community center where he first took the stage to the sometimes raucous, sometimes stylish clubs where he got his start as an entertainer.

Richard Pryor was an exceptional human being — a genius who changed the rules of comedy in America — and the website aims to show how the seeds of that genius were planted. At the same time, it suggests how Pryor’s life story makes richer sense when set against larger historical backdrops: the story of how the Midwest’s premier “Sin City” became, during the Cold War, a leading “All-American City”; the story of how black neighborhoods were demolished in “urban renewal” efforts (Pryor’s childhood home was itself targeted by a wrecking ball so that Peoria might be linked to an interstate highway); and, most of all, the story of how black Americans, while locked into segregation in the Midwest, defied that system in inventive and forceful ways.

This post is by Scott Saul, the author of Becoming Richard Pryor (HarperCollins), now out in paperback. He teaches American history and literature at UC-Berkeley, and also is the host of the Chapter & Verse podcast. Follow him on Twitter @scottsaul4.

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

An Animated Introduction to Goethe, Germany’s “Renaissance Man”

in History, Literature | January 28th, 2016

We all know the name Goethe — some of us even know the full name, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I’ve never lived in the renowned 18th- and 19th-century writer, politician, and cultural polymath’s homeland of Germany, but even when I lived in Los Angeles, I regularly went to my local branch of the Goethe-Institute for German cultural events. Even in Korea, where I live now, Goethe has left a wide if shallow mark: you can see The Sorrows of Young Werther in the form of an elaborate stage musical, for instance, and buy almost all the goods you need in life from the enormous conglomerate named after the young lady on whom Werther concentrates his doomed affections, Lotte.

But why, more than 180 years after Goethe’s death, does his name still come up in so many different contexts? And given that, why do so many of us know so little about his long, varied, colorful, and highly productive life and career? This sounds like a job for the video wing of Alain de Botton’s School of Life, whose short primers continue to bring us up to speed on why the legacies of so many cultural figures (with one section given over to the literary) have endured, or should endure. “Goethe is one of the great minds of European civilisation, though his work is largely unknown outside of the German speaking countries,” says de Botton in their video on Goethe: “He deserves our renewed attention.”

To fill out the details provided in the School of Life’s video, you can read an overview of Goethe’s career (including details on the proper pronunciation of his name) in the accompanying Book of Life entry online. It tells the story of not just Young Werther’s creator, but “one of Europe’s big cultural heroes – comparable to the likes of Shakespeare, Dante and Homer,” skilled in letters, of course, but also in “physiology, geology, botany and optics,” who also spent stretches of his career as “a diplomat, fashion guru, a senior civil servant, a pornographer, the head of a university, a fine artist, an adventurous traveller, the director of a theatre company and the head of a mining company.”

We might call Goethe, insofar as he developed his own mastery, spanning so much of the human experience, a Renaissance man out of time — but one who, in his way, outdid even the actual men of the Renaissance. “We have so much to learn from him,” adds the Book of Life. “We don’t often hear people declaring a wish to be a little more like ‘Goethe.’ But if we did, the world would be a more vibrant and humane place.”

The Tale of the Fox: Watch Ladislas Starevich’s Animation of Goethe’s Great German Folktale (1937)

The Death Masks of Great Authors: Dante, Goethe, Tolstoy, Joyce & More

Harry Clarke’s 1926 Illustrations of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psychedelic 60s

Eugène Delacroix Illustrates Goethe’s Faust, “One of the Very Greatest of All Illustrated Books”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

in Books, History, Life, Travel | January 18th, 2016

Popular entertainment has romanticized the idea of the road trip as a wholly spontaneous adventure, but for mid-century African American motorists, planning was essential. The lodgings, restaurants, and tourist attractions where they could be assured of a warm welcome were often few and far between in the era of segregation.

The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, first printed in 1936, was an invaluable resource for travelers of color, particularly when their route took them outside of urban areas. In the pre-Internet age, publisher Victor Green, a Harlem-dwelling mailman, relied on readers to supply feedback and new locations for subsequent editions:

There are thousands of first class business places that we don’t know about and can’t list, which would be glad to serve the traveler, but it is hard to secure listings of these places since we can’t secure enough agents to send us the information. Each year before we go to press the new information is included in the new edition. When you are traveling please mention the Green Book, in order that they might know how you found their place of business, as they can see that you are strangers. If they haven’t heard about this guide, ask them to get in touch with us so that we might list their place. If this guide has proved useful to you on your trips, let us know. If not, tell us also as we appreciate your criticisms and ideas in the improvement of this guide from which you benefit. There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment. But until that time comes we shall continue to publish this information for your convenience each year.

- from the introduction to the 1949 edition

The New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has digitized 21 volumes of its Green Book collection for your browsing pleasure. It’s a trip back in time.

1936’s premier edition is geared toward visitors spending time in and around New York City. In appearance, it resembles a church bulletin or community theater program, with business card ads for beauty salons specializing in marcel waving and restaurants serving Southern home cooking. Publisher Green extols the wonders of Coney Island, Chinatown, and the Theatrical District, even as he notes that “the colored show houses are in Harlem.” He also seeks to give readers a laugh with “How to Keep From Growing Old,” a driver-specific list that could be read aloud from the passenger seat for the merriment of everyone in the car. (“In sloppy weather, drive close to pedestrians. Dry cleaners appreciate this.”)

The Green Book soon swelled to include national listings, as tourists and business travelers heeded Green’s call to beef up the info.

1961’s 25th anniversary edition includes a history of the enterprise, a fair amount of typos, newsy updates on the staff, and a renewed promise to list the best places on the moon, should lunar travel become an option.

Armchair travelers can take the NYPL’s digitized collection out for a spin by entering coordinates into a mapping feature for 1947 or 1956.

Starting in my Indiana hometown with sights set on Manhattan took me to the Cottage Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio, the Jones Restaurant in Grafton, West Virginia, and the beautifully named Trott Inn in Philadelphia, before I finally lay my virtual head at the America Hotel. (These days, it would be the Millennium Broadway.)

Enjoy your trip. In the words of Victor Green, “let’s all get together and make motoring better.”

Robert Penn Warren Archive Brings Early Civil Rights to Life

Vintage 1930s Japanese Posters Artistically Market the Wonders of Travel

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. She documented her misadventures on the road in No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late Follow her @AyunHalliday

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

American History: An Off-Kilter 1992 Student Film from South Park Creator Trey Parker

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet: 1846 Book Teaches Kids the ABCs of Slavery’s Evils

New Rosa Parks Archive is Now Online: Features 7,500 Manuscripts & 2,500 Photographs, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Hear the Declassified, Eerie “Space Music” Heard During the Apollo 10 Mission (1969)

Orson Welles Narrates the Russian Revolution in Ten Days That Shook the World (1967)

New Digital Archive, “Richard Pryor’s Peoria,” Takes You Inside the Dark, Lively World That Shaped the Pioneering Comedian

An Animated Introduction to Goethe, Germany’s “Renaissance Man”

The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, the Pre-Civil Rights Guide to Traveling Safely in the U.S. (1936–66)

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